Health by Design

At Penn, collaboration occurs fortuitously and with impact. In 2010, I had the opportunity to partner with Marilyn Jordan Taylor, who is dean of Penn’s School of Design, and City Planning Professor Genie Birch to host the 18th International Council on Women’s Health Issues (ICOWHI) conference. The topic was “Cities and Women’s Health: Global Perspectives,” one of my deepest passions. Attracting more than 350 participants from more than 30 countries, the conference proved a launching pad for new approaches to urban women’s health.

The conference inspired a book, Women’s Health and the World’s Cities, which I was thrilled to co-edit with Professor Birch and Professor Susan Wachter of Penn’s Wharton School. We are pleased to present the book on January 24 from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Penn’s Houston Hall.

For Women’s Health and the World’s Cities, we called on scholars and practitioners from the fields of urban planning, global studies, and health sciences to consider urban planning from the perspective of women’s health and to examine the effect of urbanization on women and their health.

The chapter “Transforming Urban Environments” resonates with this imperative. Penn Nursing’s Jeane Ann Grisso and colleagues identify women from Philadelphia to Manila who have led community change. “They organize, demand services, and support one another,” the authors write. “The tenacity and commitment of women leaders, in partnership with diverse stakeholders, can lead to profound urban transformation. . . . In spite of daunting realities, women in poor urban communities continue to organize to create better lives for themselves and their children.”

As urban populations continue to expand at an unprecedented rate, the demand for our communities to be responsive and adaptive to citizens’ health needs is greater than ever. This urgent need for intervention is both health-related and dependent on the fundamental systemic needs of issues like human shelter and clean drinking water. The impact of urban living is especially felt by women as gender biases, economic disparities, outmoded infrastructure, and safety threats. Reduced access to healthcare and other resources can conspire to produce dire health outcomes.

Women play critical and multiple roles in societies as mothers, leaders, students, decision-makers, voters, and workers. Health research combined with design, business, and other areas of study and expertise here at Penn are creating an increasingly influential body of work that can serve to aid and empower not only women, but the individuals and families they care for and the communities in which they live.

Sync Your Calendars

Welcome to the spring semester! It is hardly warm outside, but the intellectual energy inside Fagin Hall more than compensates. We start the term with the return of our students and we are ready to dive into a semester of inquiry and engagement.

Next month we will welcome the esteemed Dr. Angela Barron McBride, whose new book “The Growth and Development of Nurse Leaders” stands to become as seminal in our field as her 1973 book “The Growth and Development of Mothers.” She will present a Dean’s Lecture on February 28.

Each year we look forward to granting the unique honor of the Claire M. Fagin Distinguished Researcher Lecture and Award. With great pride, we honor Dr. Barbara Riegel, an expert in chronic illness and self-care, who will present the 2012 Fagin Lecture on April 5.

This academic year is significant in the history of nursing at Penn. Our 125th anniversary is in tandem with the quarter-century mark of our Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, which will honor the work of nurse historian Dr. Joan Lynaugh with a symposium on April 14.

We will take interprofessionalism to another level with the April 17 symposium “Partners in Education and Practice: Stronger Teams, Better Health,” co-hosted with the Association of Academic Health Centers, Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and the Institute of Medicine.  The concept of interprofessionalism – bringing seemingly divergent healthcare professions together to respond to need – is more important than ever in our global 21st century.

On April 21, our LIFE practice will host the second annual “Sounds of West Philadelphia” Wellness Day. In the fall, our LIFE practice recognized internationally as being unique by Lancet editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton. Wellness Day is a wonderful opportunity to see why.

And, before we know it, we will close the semester with Commencement and Alumni Weekend, which will open on May 11 with the inaugural symposium for our new Center for Global Women’s Health, a most exciting endeavor and one that is close to my heart.

As always, there is much happening. As always, I hope to see you here, taking part in all that Penn Nursing has to offer.

Resolve

Around the world there are so many ways to celebrate a new year – the Chinese New Year, the Persian New Year, the Arabic New Year, and the new year celebrated around the world on January 1.

In the midst of all the predictions and energy and glitter is a new way to celebrate: Resolution ’12. This web-based project, begun last year by the Rev. Charles L. Howard, Penn’s own university chaplain, encourages people to make New Year’s resolutions that are in the service of others.

“We were trying to experiment with how we could challenge people to put more good out there in the world,” Rev. Howard said.

I have added my resolution at www.resolution12.org, and I invite you to do the same. I encourage you to think in terms of community, of civic engagement, of global connections. As Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Goodman poignantly wrote:

“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives … not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

That potential could be in your resolution, or in mine, or in the resolve of someone we never have met. It could start with Resolution ’12.

Milestones

We at Penn Nursing are proud to share our 125th anniversary with another landmark nursing institution, the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia. Until its inception on March 2, 1886, “no one had ever heard of such a thing as nursing the sick poor [sic] except in hospitals,” recalled founder Mrs. William Furness Jenks. The work of visiting nurses was hard, often taking them to “run-down areas which housed the city’s workers” and where such contagions as typhoid, diphtheria, and tuberculosis were rampant.

The efforts of these pioneering women – indeed, all were women – and their visiting nurse counterparts around the country formed the foundation of home nursing and community nursing as we know them today.

The history of the VNA of Greater Philadelphia has its home here at Penn Nursing, in the premier center for nursing history in the world, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing. The Bates Center -- notably celebrating its 25th anniversary this year -- houses the records of the Visiting Nurse Society, and a vast collection of materials from nursing history.

The entire Bates collection – a rich array of written materials, artifacts, and photographs from nursing history -- encompasses nursing education and healthcare institutions, non-profits, and nursing luminaries. The Bates Center is open to scholars across all fields and non-academic researchers interested in nursing. It brings nursing history to life, and is a jewel of our School and our discipline. Happy anniversary to us all!

New Window on Nursing

During his visit to Penn Nursing earlier this month, Lancet editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton left us with a promise to write about the work we are doing here. A man of his word, he devoted his November 19th editor’s column to “Nursing, but not as you know it.” Dr. Horton called Penn Nursing: “. . . the country’s leading research-intensive nursing school that stands as an equal with its biomedical counterpart.” He lauded our LIFE (Living Independently For Elders) program, calling it proof of “the social value of academically led practice . . . Rarely will one witness such a successful juxtaposition of practice and research, care and inquiry.” These are extraordinary statements, particularly from the editor-in-chief of one of the world’s most esteemed medical journals.

Although nurses have historically been at the forefront of science and health, it is always particularly potent to see how the accomplishments of nurse scientists are viewed by our esteemed colleagues in medicine. What Dr. Horton saw in our programs are examples of how nursing makes a difference and how keen our faculty are to translate knowledge into care, action, and policy.

The Next Revolution

This week I was thrilled to have as a guest at Penn Nursing Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the internationally renowned medical journal The Lancet. He spent three days meeting with nursing and medical faculty, students, and University leadership. One of the main topics everywhere was how the healthcare professions can come together to respond justly and equitably to global health needs and, to achieve that, how they need to be educated together. On Wednesday Dr. Horton gave an inspiring presentation to a crowded auditorium here in Fagin Hall titled “A Bonfire of the Professions: Prospects for Global Health.”

The dean of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and I jointly hosted the lecture, which is indicative of how nursing and medicine are connected in a deep partnership, opening up opportunities for advances in health that cross continents and span seas.

Dr. Horton speaks passionately about the need for a patient-centered “revolution” in healthcare. “We are living through a healthcare crisis in the world today,” he said this week. He urged the healthcare professions to take heed that child survival, maternal health, and the infectious diseases malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS are still rampant in the parts of the world that are the poorest and have the fewest healthcare resources. He emphasized: “The current status quo simply cannot continue.”

I had the distinct pleasure to work with Dr. Horton and international colleagues on the 2010 report “Health Professionals for a New Century: Transforming Education to Strengthen Health Systems in an Interdependent World” from The Lancet and the Institute of Medicine.

In it, we advocated that “all health professionals in all countries should be educated to mobilize knowledge and to engage in critical reasoning and ethical conduct so that they are competent to participate in patient- and population-centered health systems as members of locally responsive and globally connected teams.”

To reach this vision, Dr. Horton is once again turning to Penn Nursing and to the University. He has proposed that Penn join The Lancet in a commission that would lead to “transprofessionalism,” uniting nurses, midwives, community health workers, and doctors to address global needs and inequities in healthcare.

That is a fantastic approach to global health today. We look forward to partnering with The Lancet in realizing some of the pioneering recommendations proposed in “Health Professionals for a New Century.”

Seven Billion

This is my hope as the world’s population welcomes its seven billionth citizen today:

First I want to wish the world’s seven billionth citizen a safe and happy birth. A safe birth is still too infrequent in today’s world where healthcare remains inadequate in many parts of the globe. If the seven billionth citizen is a girl child, I hope she grows into safe womanhood in a world that appreciates her, a world that provides her with a safe living environment, work that is satisfying and stimulating, and recreational opportunities that offer her a healthy life. I hope the seven billionth citizen is successful at creating a healthier world for women, who are at the core of healthy families, successful communities, and productive societies.

Welcome, and know that you can change the world.